Bash The Bishop

[Commodore]

Not sure if anyone caught Kevin Bishop’s new show last Friday Night.

I watched on the strength of the pilot that was shown last year on Comedy Showcase, which I liked, and thought I’d give it a chance. There were some poor impressions that let it down a bit even though the material was generally quite good.

I can see myself persevering with it; if only for the adverts featuring imaginary celebrity fragrances and the games featured on the ‘Fony Playbox’.

Not bad for some kid who used to be in Grange Hill (after my time though).

[Purves Grundy]

Bash The Bishop

I meant to give it a go (but forgot) purely on the strength of the Take That! edition of Star Stories I once saw on a plane and which literally reduced me to tears of laughter.

[Guest]

Bash The Bishop

If my PVR has done the business I'll thrill you all with my views on this later.

[Guest]

Bash The Bishop

Oh, Mother! This is a stinker. It's slightly below the level of jokes you think of in the pub but are too embarrassed to say because your mates would take the piss. Or, it's a collection of jokes that were met with awkward silences when writers suggested them in production meetings for other, bad sketch shows. Or, it's a conceptual PhD thesis on What's Gone Wrong With Sketch Comedy In The 00s.

Let's see. Lots and lots (and lots) of sketches based on very simple puns: Dangerously High School Musical, Bridget Jones's Diarrhoea etc. Occasionally these are combined with impressions that are nothing like the celebrity in question and make no point about them, eg Walken's Crisps, in which a man who sounds nothing like Christopher Walken plays a scene with a man who sounds nothing like Gary Lineker. Walken is a mob boss who wants to know where Lineker is hiding some crisps.

What else? Incredibly old jokes: something about the three bears being investigated for abducting Goldilocks; a news report about an outbreak of continuity errors in which the newsreaders' costumes keep changing. Several sketches based on rank homophobia (eg The Bourne Realisation, in which Jason Bourne realises he's gay - it's "bumming soon" and is distributed by Gay Line Cinema, "in association with Cock Jockey Productions and Anal Love Films").

Cold Sore Mountain, a spoof of Cold Mountain in which Nicole Kidman's character has a cold sore. An American quiz show based on the idea that Americans are all thick cowboys. If there was a sketch that was funnier than its own basic idea, I can't remember it (Sophie's Choice - The Musical was a big culprit here.)

The only one I liked was a running gag that was just Jonathan Ross introducing his next guest, who is always Ricky Gervais.

[Jimski]

Bash The Bishop

Flicked past it a few times and it did indeed look like one of the worst comedy sketch shows ever.

[David Agnew]

Bash The Bishop

The clips used in the trailer were bad enough. The Walken/Lineker sketch was used (they didn't even have the hairstyles remotely close), as was Bishop doing a skydiving skecth which consisted of him pulling a funny face. If that's a sample of what's on offer (in fact they usually try and put some of the funnier bits in the ads, don't they?), I'll pass.

Even worse than Charlotte Church's show.

[Spearmint Rhino]

Bash The Bishop

I completely missed last year's series, as torn apart by The Horse up there, but I've seen a couple of this year's and it's absolutely fucking brilliant.

[Jimmy Bignutz]

Bash The Bishop

Is it, though? The impressions seem a lot better than the first series, and it has its moments, but there's a hell of a lot of crap, of the sort that "The" "Horse" mentions - the overriding impression is of a show where no joke gets rejected, no rewrites take place. For example those Nintendo Wii spoofs - it's the the most basic level of "let's think of something mundane that you wouldn't make a computer game out of" - "Er, I dunno... drinking a beer?", "Yeah, that'll do", and then a month later they're filming it.

I quite like those Mind Cop sketches though.

[Bored Of Education]

Bash The Bishop

I think I am going to stick with The Horse's recomendation

Who was the last funny impressionist?

[erwin]

Bash The Bishop

Don't no one say Mike Yarwood, 'cos he weren't.

[tracteurgarcon]

Bash The Bishop

Bored of Education wrote:

I think I am going to stick with The Horse's recomendation

Who was the last funny impressionist?

Alfred Sisley?

[Lucy Waterman]

Bash The Bishop

I see the Spearmint Rhino Patent Barometer Of Wrongness About Comedy is still in working order.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Bash The Bishop

Bored of Education wrote:

I think I am going to stick with The Horse's recomendation

Who was the last funny impressionist?

Dermot morgan was a genius mimic and satirist.

[Guest]

Bash The Bishop

Dermot Morgan was very far from being a genius of any kind. He was a decent comedian and an okay impressionist but a lot of Scrap Saturday was, let's not kid ourselves here, crap and unfunny.

The reasons that it uniformly got -- and still gets -- a good press was because there was zero competition at the time, and because its main target was Charles Haughey, who was and posthumously remains a massively unpopular figure with about 60% of the population.

Around 1993, just after Scrap Saturday but before Father Ted, Morgan pitched a Have I Got News For You-type panel quiz show to RTE, called Newshounds, which he was the driving creative force behind. RTE commissioned a pilot episode, looked at it, and then said thanks but no thanks.

Morgan raged against this injustice in countless interviews in the Irish media for the next few years until his death. Most people took his word for it, on the grounds that RTE had also recently cancelled not just Scrap Saturday but also the genuinely excellent Nighthawks (while simultaneously commissioning things like Ryantown).

However, I happen to know someone who got to see the pilot episode of Newshounds, a person whose opinion on comedic matters I would very much trust, and his verdict was: "Absolute shite."

Morgan was a reasonably talented man but there's no point in building him up into something that he patently wasn't. All three of the lads on Apres Match are better impressionists than he was and, at minimum, two of them are sharper satirists.

[Spearmint Rhino]

Bash The Bishop

I've got to revive this thread to do a U-turn and say that the Kevin Bishop Show is utter crap.

I suppose there are a couple of possibilities here:

1) It was always crap, but I was drunk when I watched the first couple
2) He spunked all his best gags in the first couple

I'm going to bravely maintain it's the latter.

In any case, the episode I watched the other day was so unfunny and punchline-free that I got really angry and switched off in disbelief after 10 minutes. I will never watch it again.

[Mr Beast]

Bash The Bishop

Spearmint Rhino wrote:

In any case, the episode I watched the other day was so unfunny and punchline-free that I got really angry and switched off in disbelief after 10 minutes. I will never watch it again.

This bit sounds like a Roy Keane quote.